McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (43 page)

“Of course not. Mostly we talked about sports. I did most of the talking. They have been gone so long that they were interested in the standings.”

“Then what did you learn?”

“That something big is going on. It was in their faces and the carefully casual way in which they feigned interest in what I was saying. And it was in their evasions when I drifted onto the subject of how the war is going. And mostly it was in the way they drank.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and they called it a night. Most people spending their first night on Earth after years in space would have littered the table with empty wine bottles. They strolled back to their hotel. Most spacers would have had to be delivered by cab and helped to bed. They drank like they were on duty, which means they had an early meeting at headquarters this morning.

“Get me Bruno Hauser on the phone once you’ve set up this afternoon’s conference.”

“Yes, sir,” Claris, snapping shut her dictation screen.

Vasloff leaned back in his chair and activated the swivel that would rotate him to face the window. An electric tour boat was gliding downstream in the canal, half full of tourists. Not bad considering the weather. The skies were leaden, with a slow drizzle falling.

His screen beeped a few minutes later. He swiveled back and pressed the accept key. His screen cleared to show the features of a short, jowly man. It took a few seconds for the image to build, indicating that call encryption was set on high.

“Hello, Mikhail. What can I do for you this fine day?”

“Speak for yourself, Bruno. It’s raining here.”

“Too bad. We have scattered clouds and a cool breeze off the lake. How may I help you?”

He told his caller about his evening.

“It sounds most pleasant. I have eaten at the yacht club many times. The service could be improved, but the food is first rate. What has this to do with me?”

“They went to Headquarters this morning. I would like to know who they met with.”

“You know we haven’t anyone inside Navy Headquarters, not since they discovered our young man who was watering their plants.”

Vasloff nodded. The era when nations spied on one another had not outlived the nations themselves, but the spy trade was very much alive. Commercial firms used confidential agents to gain competitive advantage, and of course, political factions strove to find out what their opponents were up to.
Peace Now!
had its own security department in charge of ferreting out those whose loyalty was suspect. So, too, did the Space Navy.

“Do what you can. If it were just the Rykands, I would not be concerned, but Dan Landon is in overall command. His coming back to Earth indicates that whatever it is, he is willing to be away from his desk for at least two and a half months. That means it is important. We don’t want to be caught flat-footed the way we were when Sar-Say pulled his prison break!”

“Understood, Mikhail. I will run the trap lines and see what I can learn. I’ll report tomorrow.”

“Excellent, Bruno. Say hello to your wife for me.”

#

Strategic Plans occupied one floor of Fleet Headquarters and their computers took up a full subbasement. Mark, Lisa, and Dan Landon delivered their cargo of encrypted data cubes the next morning. Mark and Lisa helped the technicians catalog the data and prioritize it for input while Landon talked to Admiral N’Gomo about their unexpected visitor the previous evening.

“I don’t like it,” N’Gomo said. “The man has too damned many spies in parliament, and I fear, in this building.”

“They’re good, all right,” Landon agreed. “Who knew we were meeting with the Coordinator and that we were returning here with you?”

“I’ll put Security on it. These political types think that anything that gives them a leg up is fair game; but, damn it, we’ve a war going on. Perhaps I can get whoever tipped off Vasloff shot.”

“If not, sir; send him my way. I’d like to introduce him to a couple of years on Nemesis.”

By the end of a long first day, the computer techs were clear on what was needed to set up a simulation of a general offensive against the Broa. All they had to do was break down the raw data, put it into a form the computers could understand, and then input it and a few billion other tidbits.

Landon said goodbye at 16:00 and rushed to catch a flight to Spain, leaving Mark and Lisa to interpret for the techs. That night, back in their room at the
Villa am See
, Lisa remarked that interpreting High Broan was easier than some of the things she’d been asked at H.Q.

They spent the next three days building the timeline for the Battle of Sabator in a way that it could be coded properly. For this they used records from
Galahad
. The specialists were interested in all manner of minutiae, from how long after the explosion the interception order went out, to how quickly the local system government organized the massive response following their ships’ destruction.

Mark handled those details while Lisa helped with the communications intercepts. She’d spent a full week working watch and watch, listening to Broan chatter and computer directives that flooded out from the planet and Sabator space installations. Even so, she had barely skimmed the surface, catching brief snippets of those intercepts the computers thought might be important. There were literally millions of other signals the computers recorded and filed away for later review.

These had to be run through specialized translation programs, categorized, time stamped, and assembled into a searchable database. Just as a single innocuous order to clear a stargate had led to the Broan home system, there was no telling what small tidbit might prove crucial in developing their battle plan.

By the end of the week, they were ready to run a calibration test on the model. After breakfast at the villa, Mark and Lisa reported to H.Q. and were ushered into the auditorium that had once been the press briefing center for the Stellar Survey. The podium was still there, but suspended over it was the largest holocube either of them had ever seen.

“We’ll start with a simple calibration scenario,” Lieutenant Hector Cruz, the officer leading the team, said as he led them to two comfortable seats down front. Save for his uniform, Cruz didn’t look much like a naval officer. He was a small, nervous man with an indefinable birdlike quality about him. He had the quality of a university grad student about him. That was what he had been before being drafted.

The holocube lit to show a G-class star surrounded by twelve multicolored planets. The planets followed circular and elliptical threads of light around the star. Two flattened blue tori represented asteroid belts spread out between the fifth and sixth, and sixth and seventh planets.

“Recognize it?” Cruz asked.

“Sabator,” Mark replied.

“Now then, let’s add our operational space.”

He did something with his hand control and a red haze appeared, surrounded the star to form a hollow sphere. The seven inner planets were in the clear center of the sphere while the outermost five were submerged in the haze.

“One thing highlighted by your adventure, Mark, is the importance of the critical limit. That defines the ‘terrain’ of this particular battle space.

“The critical limit for Sabator is just beyond the seventh planet. Inside that limit, we cannot use our stardrives, meaning that battles must be fought in normal space where we lose our ability to materialize and dematerialize at will.

“The effectiveness of our primary weapon is also degraded inside the limit. Beyond it, a superlight missile has essentially infinite range. Down close to the fifth planet where the battle was fought, a superlight missile can’t punch through more than a few million kilometers before stress overloads the generator.”

“Which means that we need to do our fighting outside the limit,” Mark said, remembering how he had wished
Yeovil
or
Galahad
would swoop down to rescue him.

“True. However, even that constraint is an advantage. The Broa have to place their stargates beyond the limit to make them work properly. That puts them out of their zone of optimum operation and into ours.

“What you are about to see is a simulation of an Alpha Attack on Sabator. Our ships are staging from one light-month out in deep space. The mission parameters are to destroy the system stargates in minimum time and escape. We are running this in real time. Ready?”

“Let’s see it,” Lisa answered.

In addition to the star, the planets, and the asteroid belts, there were six golden hourglass symbols representing the stargates. All were in the plane of the ecliptic and within the red haze. Two were close to the critical limit, while one was out at the distance of Planet Eight.

“Beginning now,” Cruz said, pressing a stud on his hand controller.

On the screen, a cluster of green dots appeared near each hourglass, then disappeared five seconds later. Sometime in those seconds, all six hourglass symbols vanished.

“End simulation.”

Mark blinked. “Was that it?”

“That was it,” Cruz said with a grin.

“What happened?”

 “We stood off, raced in, let fly, and escaped, all in a span of 4.7 seconds. It is essentially the tactic you used in escaping Pastol, Commander. Even if the Broa bathe the system with lidar, by the time they get a speed-of-light echo, we’ll be long gone.”

“The Admiral has to see this…!” Lisa said, excitement in her voice.

“Which one?” Mark asked.

“Both of them!”

#

Dan Landon returned that evening and Lieutenant Cruz arranged a briefing for 20:00 hours. Admiral N’Gomo also attended.

Following the “Attack on Sabator” demonstration, both officers asked to see it again, this time in slow motion. At one-tenth normal speed, they watched the system clock begin counting. At 1.2 seconds, six human cruisers appeared. At 2.7 seconds, the cruisers launched two SMs at each of the Sabator stargates. Missile flight time was instantaneous. Separate windows showed close-ups of the stargates. In each window, the SM debris blossom appeared as the missiles came crashing back sublight. The blossoms enveloped the gates, destroying them. Nothing happened for two seconds, following which, the cruisers winked out of existence as though they had never been.

“That was fast,” Dan Landon commented sardonically.

“Yes,” Admiral N’Gomo agreed. “Amazingly fast. Let’s see how well we do in a larger attack.”

The view on the screen blanked and was immediately replaced by a familiar diagram. It was the stargate topology chart from the Pastol database. Enemy stars were highlighted in yellow, with their stargate links in red. The diagram grew larger as the view zoomed in. A few hundred stars remained when the view halted. The prominent star at the center of the cube was labeled “System X”.

“Sirs, we will now show you a simulation of a full scale attack on the heart of the Sovereignty. Please keep in mind that this is only a calibration run for the model. It uses nominal parameters. For the study, we will have to correlate the effects of three-sigma variation on all important parameters and their combinations. We’re talking another three weeks work, minimum.

 “Caveat noted, Hector,” N’Gomo said. “Let’s see it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The time scale was calibrated in days, with the view changing at the rate of one simulated day per second. Cruz started the simulation. Nothing happened for ten seconds. Then half the stars in the cube simultaneously turned a lurid shade of magenta.

“That is the initial strike, sirs. We assumed all ships in the strike force are prepositioned and will hit their targets simultaneously.”

Other stars began to shift from yellow to magenta as the central cloud expanded outward. As it approached the limits of the cube, the scene pulled back to keep the advancing wave of magenta stars within the observation volume.

“Now you are seeing the second phase as our ships disperse to go after secondary and tertiary targets. Each ship attacks as soon as it is in position and moves on.”

In the affected volume, stars would occasionally turn yellow, only to flash magenta again a few seconds later.

 “What is that about?” Landon asked, pointing out the dot labeled System X, which had changed color several times.

“The yellow denotes when we estimate the Broa will have had time to get one or more replacement gates into operation. The magenta is when we destroy the replacements.”

“Assumptions?”

“That they have an infinite supply of spare gates and that we have an infinite supply of SMs.” He grinned. “Obviously, that needs to be refined.”

Overall, the edges of the magenta cloud continued to expand, although more slowly with each passing ‘day.’ When the timeline counter reached 400 days, the one keeping track of neutralized enemy star systems stood at 10,000. The simulation ended.

 “Impressive!” N’Gomo said after several seconds. Turning to Landon, he said, “You were right, Dan. The stardrive truly represents a quantum leap over the gate. Why the long face?”

Mark and Lisa each turned toward Landon. Sure enough, he did not look happy.

 “As Lieutenant Cruz notes, there are a hell of a lot of variables in his equations. Ten thousand stars cut out of the network is a good start, but they still only represent one percent of the Sovereignty. At this rate, we’ll be a century at this job.”

 “It’s the most important one percent, Admiral,” Lieutenant Cruz answered. “Strategies and Intentions estimates that if we can cut off the home world, and the quadrant and sector capitals, their house of cards will come tumbling down.”

“For how long?”

“Sir?”

“How long can we deprive those systems of their stargates?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “That is what we will be studying in the next phase, sir.”

“It seems to me that we should be studying something else,” Landon mused, almost as though he were speaking to himself.

“What is that, Admiral?”

“Sabator may or may not have put them on alert about the danger we represent. However, this…” He waved at the yellow-and-red globule of stars with the bright magenta blob at its center. “… will bring them to full alert. Our use of SMs will tell them who it is that is doing this to them.”